I Done Got Marrit

Husband is sitting at the corner clackiting away at his 'puter as I type this.

I am beginning to take stock of the nuptial chaos, and thinking about What Comes Next. For the last eighteen months I have thought and felt and wrote and fretted about this wedding, and after 72 hours of sleeplessness and revelry and tears and cake and six days of Canadian honeymoon, the damn hullabaloo and general Big Deal is....over. I feel an internal deflation....aaaaaaaahhhhhppppppssssst. There.

Now what?

Three dozen thank you cards to write, a move to undertake, an apartment to decorate, a new diet to begin, a job to find, a Master's thesis to organize, a body to scour out and deep-clean and generally upgrade. All to which I say, onward ho!

We'll see what develops.

on writing

I recently told a friend of mine that I felt, at age 30, totally divorced from my creative self. Up until I went to college, I wrote poems and snippets of stories with un-self-censored delight. Not every day or week, or even every month, but fairly often. Like pretty much any young person, I was blithely confident in my desires, which were centered around Being A Writer. My writing career--the actual work, you see-- would begin, I felt sure, at some point in the distant, hazy Future. All I wanted to do, in the meantime, was play. I edited my high school's literary magazine, wrote class papers and produced creative poems and a few stories (poetry was more my medium in high school. (Much of it was obnoxious, pretentious, and rarely revised, as is the wont of high school poetry producers.) I received effusive praise for anything I wrote, which reinforced my youthful insouciance: I Am A Rockstar At This and Am Destined To Become Famous.

Predictably, once I hit college, such confidence took a nosedive. Certainly, considering that I went to a selective and intellectually rigorous liberal arts college, this is pretty much par for the course. As an 18 year old, it seemed to me that all my classmates: a) had scored upwards of 1600 on their SATs or had maintained some ridiculously high GPA, accomplishments I'd never bothered with; b) had the intellectual style of razors in conference, and c) dressed better, drank more and did more drugs, and were generally way cooler and more brilliant, in my eyes, than I thought I was or could be.

None of that is out of the ordinary. It is a truth much understood that feeling like a smear on the wall is the college freshman's lot. I eventually got over it, as do most. (It took me a year and a half of aimless college-dropout dithering, but it happened.) But although I secretly kind of wanted to, I avoided taking any creative writing courses, having heard tales of how difficult/pretentious/intimidating were the professor and the select group of students he taught. I met with enough success in my other courses to give me *some* confidence in my academic/intellectual abilities. (As anyone who reads this can surmise, I am not exactly overflowing with positive, can-do spirit.)

Somewhere during my college years I lost the uncomplicated relationship with a creative self that I'd had in childhood and teenagerdom. This is slightly ironic since the going wisdom is that you "what you want to do/be" at college. (I must stop writing now to laugh.) When I was younger I enjoyed, and indulged, the desire to write without mindfucking it. In college, intimidated by what I perceived as an academic and intellectual environment that was "out of my league," I resisted any sort of creative writing, convinced I wasn't good enough. When I did write something, I constantly revised as I wrote, thus stifling the exuberance that got me to sit down in the first place. Before, when I wanted to write something, I happily sat down and wrote. Sure, a lot of it was drivel, but some of it, I think, was not.

At least, not for my age. If I wrote that kind of stuff NOW I'd make Anne Rice look like Henry fricking James.

The point is, I had a creative urge and I expressed it. In retrospect, this was ultimately to the benefit of my self-confidence and sense of self.

I need to figure out how to incorporate writing into my life again, and to conceive of it in a more natural way--just as something that I do, like brushing my teeth--without letting my all-or-nothing (with the emphasis on nothing) tendencies get in the way of just...doing it. Writing, regardless of who I think is reading, regardless of whether I deem it to be "good" at the time. This last is quite challenging.

When I am writing an academic paper, I pick at each sentence, searching for just the right turn-of-phrase or vocabulary word to use. My mind doesn't exactly supply these on demand, so the process, while ultimately fruitful, is agonizingly slow. While I was writing my undergraduate thesis I took smoke breaks quite literally every 10 minutes because the writing process as I experienced it was not only slow, it was nerve-wracking. I need to nip this impulse in the bud if I'm to enjoy putting words to paper again. Let the words flow first, crappy as they may well be. They can be refined and revised...later.

Well, I must to bed. The last bunch of weeks have been ones of wedding-related toil, and the mind wanders....zzzzz.

A Scribbler's (Opening) Statement

Now that I have given this precious blip in the Internet-abyss a proper dressing up (in the form of nitpicky analyzing of background shades and font styles) it's time to actually Write Something.

I suppose I could start by detailing my Purpose here. No, fuck that. Internets, I owe you no Purpose!

Well, here are a few things I would like to explore in this space.

1. food, either food I make at home or consume elsewhere, and matters related to my master's degree in Gastronomy

2.Various and sundry laments, musings, ruminations, pithy commentary, bitching and moaning about daily minutiae, all of which will perhaps interest no one but myself

3. stories of my travels in this country and abroad


If anyone should happen upon this blog, welcome. As the impeccable Paula Deen likes to say, sit down and visit awhile, y'all!

Lettuce Commence

The Lettuce of Commencement.